Daniel Bates

Research

I am a Research Associate in the Computer Architecture Group, under the supervision of Dr Robert Mullins. During my PhD, I worked on exploring possible designs for a massively parallel processing fabric, as a part of the Loki project. I am now refining the chosen configuration and working towards a physical implementation.

The fabric's design lies somewhere between an FPGA and a multicore processor, with hundreds or thousands of simple, tightly-coupled cores connected by an on-chip network. We hope to be able to exploit the tight-coupling to use combinations of cores in novel ways, such as building more-complex and specialised virtual processors out of many cores, or implementing small helper engines to speed up sequential execution by, for example, prefetching data. I am particularly interested in the potential for simultaneously increasing performance and reducing power consumption by distributing a program across a large number of cores.